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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Dream logic can be an easy out for a story, a way to have anything happen and events flow without any logical sequence. When it works well, though, it gives a sense of connection, as if that work depicts a world more real than our own, a template from which we're only a fuzzy copy.

I won't claim that Brad Teare's Cypher -- originally published as comics in the early '90s and collected in a book in 1997 -- reaches that level, but it does use dream logic effectively and consistently, telling stories about its nameless brush-headed protagonist that hang together without making much logical sense or featuring anything in the way of explainable plots.

We never learn that guy's name -- my theory is that he is "Cypher" -- but we see him run through ten named stories, some which run into each other and some of which have subtler connections. None of them make direct linear sense: they're all bizarre, with our hero either explicitly going into dreams (though a job in a sensory-deprivation tank) or just being caught up in strange events and different worlds.

Teare has -- or had, in the mid-90s -- a stark, scratchboard or woodcut art style, stark black and white with precise little lines like knives. That helps sell these stories: the feel solid and grounded, as if they're carved, even as ridiculous things are happening. Cypher is a weird little book of comics, and it seems to be Teare's only comics work to date -- he's a painter these days. But, if you happen to come across it, it's amusingly quirky and attractively drawn.